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The View from My Kitchen

Benvenuti! I hope you enjoy il panorama dalla mia cucina Italiana -- "the view from my Italian kitchen,"-- where I indulge my passion for Italian food and cooking. From here, I share some thoughts and ideas on food, as well as recipes and restaurant reviews, notes on travel, and a few garnishes from a lifetime in the entertainment industry.

You can help by leaving comments on posts and by becoming a follower. More than a hundred thousand people all over the world have viewed the blog and that's great. But every great leader needs followers and if I am ever to achieve my goal of becoming the next great leader of the Italian culinary world :-) I need followers! I promise, I'm not going to spam anybody. I'd just like to know who's out there and what your thoughts are on what I'm doing.

Grazie mille!

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Shame on Paula Deen

Tar and Feathers for the Butter Queen

I don't know what to make of Paula
Deen.......but then again, I never have.

She started out in the food biz as a
Bag Lady. Working under that name, she made bag lunches, which her
two sons marketed and delivered to local business people. She moved
up through the ranks, ultimately establishing herself with her
uber-successful “Lady and Sons” restaurant in Savannah, Georgia.
A self-published cookbook followed, then more cookbooks, then the
Food Network came calling, and the rest is history. Paula Deen is now
the Southern Julia Child with a string of popular TV shows, a bunch
of bestselling cookbooks, and enough product endorsement contracts to
choke a mule. She's won an Emmy, fans throng to her public
appearances, and her restaurants continue to do land office business.
Not a bad shake for a divorced mom from Albany, Georgia.

When she first showed up on TV, Paula,
who had once suffered from panic attacks and agoraphobia, was
concerned that a national audience would find her “too Southern.”
Instead, they found her completely captivating and her down home
style of cooking – with lots of butter and sugar and other naughty
ingredients – was a novel counterpoint to the prevailing trend of
bean sprouts and brown rice.

All well and good. But.........

I live in the South and have done so
for more than thirty years. Never mind the Yankee audience; I find
Paula Deen to be too Southern. Even my Alabama-born-and-bred wife
admits that Paula's overblown magnolias and mint juleps persona gets
on her nerves. I mean, nobody in
the South says “y'all” eighteen times in a single sentence. Dial
it back. Please! It's
almost a caricature.

I've seen the
“Buttah Queen” in person on several occasions and I've yet to
make it through one of her cooking demos. In the first place, she
doesn't cook, relying instead on assistants to man the pots and pans
while she regales her fawning fans with personal anecdotes. Some of
them are very personal. Paula, do we really need to
hear about your adult undergarments at a cooking show? To
paraphrase another fine Southerner, the late, great Lewis Grizzard,
“Sister, I don't believe I'd a told that!”

For another thing,
Southern cooks don't live in an antebellum time warp. Things like
olive oil and low fat milk do exist in Southern kitchens, and
Southern cooks are hip to current health and nutrition trends. It
ain't all about hoecakes and fatback and collard greens anymore.

It was wretched
excesses like deep fried butter balls that put Paula's homey little
Southern granny image on the radar screens of people like Anthony
Bourdain and Andrew Zimmern, both of whom have roundly criticized
Paula's peddling of unhealthy foods to a nation struggling with
record setting obesity. The release of a children's cookbook called
“Paula Deen's Cookbook for the Lunchbox Set” prompted Barbara
Walters to join the chorus, asking Deen
if she seriously thought telling kids to eat cheesecake for breakfast
and chocolate cake, meatloaf, and French fries for lunch was such a
good idea. Bourdain has famously called her “the most dangerous
woman in America” for sweetly smiling at the camera while
simultaneously throwing metaphorical anchors to people drowning in
fat.

Want
an example? Try one of her signature dishes, “The Lady's Brunch
Burger.” To make one of these cardiologist's delights you need a
half-pound of ground beef, an egg, two slices of bacon, a modest
tablespoon of butter, a “house seasoning” that consists of salt,
pepper, and garlic powder, a little onion, a little parsley, and a
couple of glazed doughnuts.

You
mix the beef, onion, and parsley together and “season liberally”
with the “house seasoning.” Next you fry up the burger, fry up
the bacon, and fry up the egg in the butter. Now you slap the burger
on a doughnut, top it with the bacon and the fried egg, and cover it
with another doughnut!

And
now Paula Deen says she has type 2 diabetes.

The
announcement was met with a growing wave of outrage. Not that anybody
is surprised. She's 65 years old, overweight, and is the mainstay of
America's butter, sugar, and salt industries. She also smokes. But
the timing just stunk.

You
see, Paula was diagnosed three years ago. Three years during which
she continued to flog her Lady's Brunch Burger, Krispy-Kreme Bread
Pudding, Bacon Cheeseburger Meatloaf, Deep-Fried Cheesecake, and The
Lady's Cheesy Mac – a concoction of deep-fried macaroni and cheese
wrapped in bacon – to an unsuspecting public. Three years during
which she opted not to share her diagnosis with her Food Network
bosses lest they say something like, “Umm.......Paula, maybe it's
time to shift focus.”

Paula,
who excuses her three-year lapse in judgment by saying that she
needed time to adjust and felt she had no advice or help to offer the
public when she was first diagnosed, has gone on record refusing to
change her fat and sugar laden ways. But now she apparently feels she
has something to offer the public; her new contract as a spokesperson
for drugmaker Novo Nordisk's new Victoza, a daily non-insulin
injectable.

Tweets
the irascible Bourdain, “Thinking of getting into the leg breaking
business, so I can profitably sell crutches later.” But then
Anthony never has had the warm fuzzies for Paula.

Now,
however, even her stalwart fans are jumping into the fray. One such
likens Deen to someone who brags on the joys of smoking two packs a
day and then shills for a nicotine patch after developing lung
cancer.

Diabetics
in her fan base are outraged. Some think that she should volunteer to
serve as an unpaid spokesperson
for the American Diabetes Association instead of tucking herself into
the wallet of a drug company.

Oddly
enough, the Association is currently supporting Deen, saying that she
may “inspire many people living with type 2 diabetes to take a more
positive approach to their diabetes care.” Yeah! Maybe they'll be
inspired to have a “Lady's Brunch Burger” AND a side of “The
Lady's Cheesy Mac!” Get a clue! The woman has publicly stated that she has no intention of changing her style. How do you inspire people who are forced by the disease to change their lifestyles by refusing to change yours?

Paula's
principal employer is standing behind her – for now. Food Network
is ready to “support her as she confronts this new challenge,
taking her lead on what future episodes will offer her fans.” We'll
see how that goes. Coincidentally, Paula's boy Bobby has just
premiered a new offering on the network. “Not My Mama's Meals”
takes Paula's recipes and makes them healthier. Hmmmm........wouldn't
it be better under the circumstances for her to take that one upon
herself?

Hypocrite.
That's the word in the headlines today. It was easy for the sweet old
Southern lady to brush aside attacks from bad old culinary
curmudgeons like Bourdain and Zimmern, but can she withstand a
backlash from her simple, down home fan base? I think Paula really
needs to embrace her current situation, apologize for her bad
judgment, modify her on-air persona and style, back off her
questionable financial arrangement, and take her fans' advice to
volunteer.

C'mon,
Paula! We all know you're not a classically trained chef. You're just
a common old Southern cook who done good. But is your son better? How
come he can
make healthy Southern meals and you can't? Maybe it's time to stop
being so defensive and let some of the honest criticism sink in.
Humble pie might be a good recipe to include in a forthcoming
diabetic cookbook.

Who Am I (and Why Should You Care)?

I've been around long enough to know a little bit about a lot of things. That said, there are a couple of things I know a little bit more about; food and entertainment.

I've been cooking since I was a kid -- a very long time, indeed -- and I've spent most of my adult life in the entertainment industry.

I've been writing about one or the other of these topics since the '80s, and I have been published in numerous magazines and newspapers over the years. I also spent the better part of two decades behind a microphone as the host of my own radio talk show.

Does all of this make me an expert? Nah! But I'm certainly entitled to my opinion -- and so are you! :-)